Reverence

Reverence is "a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe; veneration".[1] The word "reverence" in the modern day is often used in relationship with religion. This is because religion often stimulates the emotion through recognition of God, the supernatural, and the ineffable. Reverence involves a humbling of the self in respectful recognition of something perceived to be greater than the self. Thus religion is commonly a place where reverence is felt.

However, similar to awe, reverence is an emotion in its own right, and can be felt outside of the realm of religion.[2] Whereas awe may be characterized as an overwhelming "sensitivity to greatness," reverence is seen more as "acknowledging a subjective response to something excellent in a personal (moral or spiritual) way, but qualitatively above oneself" [3] Solomon describes awe as passive, but reverence as active, noting that the feeling of awe (i.e., becoming awestruck) implies paralysis, whereas feelings of reverence are associated more with active engagement and responsibility toward that which one reveres. Nature, science, literature, philosophy, great philosophers, leaders, artists, art, music, wisdom, and beauty may each act as the stimulus and focus of reverence.

"[Epigram] Unlike the physical universe, which for most people become increasingly bleak and terrifying the better it is known, the biological world yields an increasing sense of sacredness the better it is known. The more we know about life, the more we can care about it." [/Epigram] - Ursula Goodenough, "What Science Can and Cannot Offer to a Religious Narrative"

... an important novelty in Goodenough's perspective is that for her " 'nature' encompasses not just our direct experience of the natural world but also our scientific understanding of it." At the end of her Introduction, Goodenough alludes to this view when she says the "story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos" but this is the case "only if we all experience a solemn gratitude that we exist at all, share a reverence for how life works, and acknowledge a deep and complex imperative that life continue"

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... Goodenough describes The Sacred Depths of Nature as a "contribution to present-day religiopoiesis" (562). She distinguishes religiopoesis from more traditional theological reconstruction that works to incorporate new insights into traditional myths, rituals and theology. Religiopoesis is a crafting of religion, a finding of ways to tell a story - the scientific story in her case - to convey meaning and motivation. It operates between two poles, the more reflective or theological pole and the more spiritual or feeling-directed pole. In the end, Goodenough seems to think a scientific understanding of life, what she calls the "Epic of Evolution" (xix)" in her book, is capable of producing belief with a capital "B" which she takes to be a constellation of compelling theology and satisfying spiritual experience. When this happens, she believes that scientific accounts will help us find "our capacity to walk humbly and with gratitude in their presence" (565). As the quotation I have used above as an epigram suggests, understanding life scientifically also then will invoke "awe and wonder" which serves as "its own inherent reward" (565).

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... In the final analysis, it is the "deep interrelatedness, our deep genetic homology, with the rest of the living world" (72) that is the lesson that most impresses Goodenough about evolution:

And now we realize that we are connected to all creatures. Not just in food chains or ecological equilibria. We share a common ancestor. We share genes for receptors and cell cycles and single-transduction cascades. We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We are connected all the way down (73).

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By the "outpouring of biological diversity" (86), humans (one of 30 million species existing today with many more millions having passed away) should be made humble, Goodenough thinks. We are called to acknowledge our solidarity with and our dependence on the web of life. As a religious naturalist, Goodenough holds it only fitting to locate deference to the devine "somewhere within the Earthly whole" (87).

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Goodenough holds that emotion, feeling, meaning and symbolism come together in human religious frameworks. She contends that we only have to look at religious art from any culture to see this. Humans have a capacity "to apprehend the meaning and the emotion embedded in symbols that endows us with our capacity for empathy" (114). Empathy paves the way for feelings we know as compassion and from compassion, which is always "in mortal conflict with our insistent sense that we should win," emerges "our haunting sense that things should be fair" (115).

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I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are (140).